The Blight of Sharia in Nigeria

The Cultural Blight of Sharia in Nigeria

By Fubara David-West


"Judge Isiyaku Mohammed said under the constitution, the federal court could not intervene in the affairs of an Islamic court."
--from a report about a Nigerian court's ruling

This kind of an outrageous judicial arrangement should not be allowed to continue, if indeed Judge Mohammed is making a point that is recognized as valid by any other legal mind in the country. The Nigerian constitution is fundamentally flawed, if it recognizes the superiority of the so-called Islamic courts over the federal courts, which will include the Nigerian Supreme Court.

It must be understood, that the arrangement, as it is interpreted by Judge Mohammed here, implies that the fundamental tenets of equality before the law are violated in jurisprudential practice. Those Nigerians, who come under the jurisdiction of the so-called Islamic courts are in effect, superior to other Nigerians.

It should be possible under such an arrangement, for some states to start setting up "Christian Courts," whose rulings will also be beyond the review of the Nigerian Supreme Court. Nigerians may then be subject to the death penalty, in some states, for instance, for breaking the Sabbath, by a strict interpretation of the Old Testament. What a cultural blight that will be!

Some people in Nigeria might just love to live in a medieval civilization, where religious injunctions and primitive concepts of justice rule, but they should not be able to tell the rest of the country that theirs is a superior value system, which must be accepted by the rest of the country.

The so-called Sharia Courts cannot have veto powers over the Federal courts, and especially not over the Nigerian Supreme Court. They cannot have veto powers over the rest of the judiciary, period. Indeed, their primitive cultural basis, tells us that the so-called Sharia courts should not even be recognized as real courts in the national scheme of things.